The Irish Times' Scores

  • Movies
For 1,130 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 53% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 43% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.9 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 Son of Saul
Lowest review score: 20 The Turning
Score distribution:
1130 movie reviews
  1. Yet, through sheer insistence, Erivo and Grande, who deserve the bump in status they’ve received, almost pull it back together with a closing duet that makes a virtue of emotional incontinence.
  2. Mind you, everyone here is suffering. That overbearing mass of existential angst almost certainly contributes to the many negative responses, but few will endure its attack without admitting they’ve sat through something out of the ordinary.
  3. For all the Hollywood gloss, Vanderbilt sounds an alarming relevance in Göring’s sneering claim that Hitler “made us feel German again” and Triest’s warning that “it happened because people let it happen”.
  4. Bentley sometimes leans too heavily on lyricism and voiceover, but the film’s earnestness and restraint cast a strange spell. Train Dreams may mourn a disappearing US, but, more movingly, its muted reverence salutes those nation builders who were never visible to begin with.
  5. No sensitive person watching Anemone could fail to be intrigued about where Ronan Day-Lewis will go next. This grandiose, inventively operatic project is no ordinary film. But it is not quite a good film either. Too monotonous. Too self-regarding. Showy to the point of meretriciousness.
  6. Die My Love is uncompromising, hypnotic, brave and often indelible looking, even when the theatricality and fractured structure erode any emotional weight. The result is an impressively punishing, intermittently brilliant bad trip that may be the worst date movie ever made.
  7. This remains a careering exercise in mid-ranking Yorgosia that just about justifies its many indulgences. We should remain grateful that a talent so odd remains somewhere adjacent to the mainstream.
  8. The Palestinian submission for international picture at the incoming Academy Awards is a handsome, old-fashioned production that, even when it is telling us things we didn’t know, confirms all our worst suspicions about the British colonial experience in the Holy Land.
  9. In common with Jude’s scathing attack on the gig economy and toxic online culture in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Kontinental ’25 takes a scattershot approach to various targets: anti-Semitism, capitalism, nationalism and religious hypocrisy. The incomparable writer-director’s dark comedy doesn’t care to resolve its heroine’s quandary; it’s out to poke with ethical heft and barbed wit.
  10. This is a cinema of introversion, concealment and evasion. Nothing is given up easily.
  11. With looming grace and the fluffy heart of a Golden Labrador, Elordi, standing in for a departing Andrew Garfield, turns out to be the most swooning Goth heart-throb since Edward Scissorhands emerged from Vincent Price’s laboratory.
  12. Despite the best efforts of Graham, menacing in monochrome flashbacks, the sanitised script never truly pins whatever unprocessed trauma is eating at the rising star.
  13. Hoover fans will know that, early on, a catastrophe looks to upset the order. Nothing in the film-making suggests, however, this dilemma will not be tidied away by the time of senior prom. Who would want to live in so dull a fantasy?
  14. Conveniently set against the fraught contemporary environs of Yale University’s philosophy department, After the Hunt offers a dull retread of the PC-gone-mad arguments that have dominated the culture wars since the 1990s.
  15. A classy film that doesn’t entirely make sense.
  16. This is a nervy study of how poverty wears people down, eroded by uncertainty and the grinding effort to stay afloat.
  17. This excellent debut feature from Ben Leonberg may be unique among horror films in fairly attracting the compound adjectives “deeply unsettling” and “utterly adorable”.
  18. Thankfully, Tron: Ares is less ponderous than Tron: Legacy, and the music is turned up to 11 in the hope you won’t notice all the shortcomings.
  19. Blunt works hard to flesh out an underwritten role, but Safdie seems more interested in Kerr’s silences than his partner’s complaints. The relationship is too ill-defined to land an emotional punch.
  20. Dickinson plays a small role as Mike’s antagonistic friend, but everything rests on Dillane’s powerhouse turn and the writer-director’s compassionate, daring script.
  21. With its fast-paced walking, talking and shouting into telephones, A House of Dynamite is a nervy, timely thriller that goes down like Coca-Cola while another US brand – its military – takes centre stage.
  22. Hassan and Ingar deliver compelling, complementary performances: Hassan is as quiet and vulnerable as Ingar is fiery and charismatic. Clarissa Cappellani’s fluid cinematography and Fiona DeSouza’s stylish edits and inserts keep pace with the youthful exuberance. Judicious use of flashback sets up a gut-punch coda.
  23. Anderson and his fine cast layer all these pyrotechnics with a palpable sadness for their characters and for the country. There are few explicit arguments here about the state of the US, but one can imagine endless such arguments being projected upon it.
  24. McConaughey and Ferrera prove the most delightful endangered bus companions since Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in Speed, exhibiting just the right balance between tension and comradeship.
  25. This messy romantic phantasmagoria is a hinterland for no one: a musical without musical numbers, a romcom without comedy. Sincerity saves it from collapse.
  26. For all the bustle, flow and noise, there is little here we haven’t seen before.
  27. For all the good work, however, the film fails to fully capture the madness of the response at home.
  28. Forming a Greek chorus, the films are only as disjointed as their context: the obliteration of normal life and the stubborn, miraculous act of carrying on.
  29. None of which is to suggest the film backs away from great gags that, as it was in 1984, continue deep into hilarious improvisation over the end credits.
  30. Anne Robbins’s costumes are dazzling. The production designer Donal Woods makes a dull country-fair storyline look magical. But for all the nostalgic gibberish about passing the baton, this latest instalment stalls and curdles.

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